Last of the Summer Wine: Savouring a classic vintage

As Last of the Summer Wine ends, a new book tells the story of the world's longest-running comedy series. Its author, Andrew Vine, looks back on a unique tV institution.

On the wall of Peter Sallis's elegant sitting room, overlooking one of London's grandest residential squares, hangs a large black-and-white framed photograph. Around it are mementos of a lifetime's acting, but this is the centrepiece that dominates everything else.

He can't see it too well these days, since, approaching 90, his sight has almost gone, but in his mind's eye it remains as clear as the day it was taken.

"Oh yes," he says, his voice soft and a smile spreading across his face, wiping away the years, "one for all and all for one, we were the Three Musketeers".

It is one of those pictures that invites a smile, an image that radiates good humour and a robust sense of fun, not least because of the twinkle in the eyes of the trio it caught at an especially happy and gratifying moment.

A third of Britain's population welcomed these men into their homes when the picture was taken in the early 1980s, though they seldom saw them like this, all gussied up in top hat, white tie and tails for a cameo in a BBC song-and-dance spectacular.

But by then, Bill Owen, Peter Sallis and Brian Wilde – or, as millions knew them, Compo, Clegg and Foggy – were the guest stars everybody wanted, the most popular comic actors in the country. They were coming to terms with fame that had arrived in middle age after solid, if unspectacular, careers as character actors. And it was all thanks to the extraordinary comic imagination of an ex-policeman and teacher called Roy Clarke, from Doncaster.

Neither Clarke, nor any of the trio in the picture, could have predicted that a modest sitcom with the most offbeat of titles, would become not only a national institution, but also find its way into the record books as the longest-running comedy series in the world, spanning 37 years.

The story of Last of the Summer Wine is one of the most extraordinary in television history, and finally draws to its close in two weeks' time with the broadcast of the final episode, the 295th. It is not only the story of a show and the people who made it, but of how it transformed a place, a struggling mill town called Holmfirth, six miles

south of Huddersfield, which swapped the textile trade for tourism, thanks to a failed stand-up comic who never forgot a dismal night on the stage of a working men's club when the audience regarded him with all the enthusiasm they usually reserved for empty pint glasses.

No other comedy series had to reinvent itself as often as Last of the Summer Wine as stars died, became too frail to continue, or wearied of conflicts in a cast where egos could be easily bruised.

Yet it inspired enormous loyalty in all those involved in the show, not least its most iconic figure, Bill Owen, a faded movie idol, who, cast as the scruffy, lecherous Compo, became one of the most beloved comic characters to appear on television.

Owen fell completely in love with the show, and with Holmfirth, becoming the champion and ambassador of them both, so devoted that he soldiered on through enormous discomfort until a few days before his death, from cancer in 1999, at the age of 85.

Others had fallen by the wayside by then. Michael Bates, as Blamire, the original authority figure, lasted for only two series before dying, aged 57, in 1978; Brian Wilde was eventually forced out by illness, Michael Aldridge by family crisis. Others would follow – Kathy Staff, transformed into the nation's favourite comic battleaxe, Nora Batty, of the wrinkled stockings, only left when terminally ill, and Thora Hird, in her 90s, insisted on being released from hospital to film her final scenes.

Last of the Summer Wine would become a home for actors of a certain vintage who enjoyed a long and affectionate history with the television audience – among them Jean Alexander, beloved as Coronation Street's Hilda Ogden, Brian Murphy, from George and Mildred, Russ Abbot, from his own sketch shows, Burt Kwouk from the Pink Panther films, along with guests including Norman Wisdom, Eric Sykes and Ron Moody.

All of them made their way to what Sallis called "Summer Wine Land", a fantasy stitched together from disparate locations in the Pennines around Holmfirth, into a beguiling nonsense world that ignored changing times and fashions in both real life and comedy as it embraced delicate linguistic subtlety as well as knockabout slapstick.

The breathtaking Pennine backdrop against which the comedy was played, helped to make it a hit around the world, selling a timeless picture-postcard image of Yorkshire to viewers in the United States and the Commonwealth, where it is a staple of cable channels.

"People think this is what England used to be like," said Kwouk. "It was never like this. This is fairyland."

It was a fairyland that captured the imagination of the public. At its peak, Last of the Summer Wine was attracting upwards of 18 million viewers every week, and sackfuls of mail were pouring into the BBC. It transcended class, age and gender, children voting it their favourite comedy show, and its fans including the Queen, who never missed it.

The letters could be weird and wonderful, many of the odder ones finding their way to Wilde, who as the loopy ex-corporal signwriter and inept leader of men, Foggy Dewhurst, attracted the attention of kindred spirits, such as the man from Cumbria who had invented a patented boot-drying machine, which he wanted passed on to Compo.

The heady days when the show topped the ratings lasted the best part of a decade, as the show became the last survivor of a golden age of BBC comedies.

It was born of the same era and culture as series including Dad's Army, The Liver Birds and The Good Life, and outlasted them all. Even when the viewing figures began to slip because of changing tastes, it never dropped out of the BBC's top 10 comedies.

Yet its beginnings were unpromising. Clarke had never heard of Holmfirth when he sat down to write a one-off half-hour comedy, in 1972, at the invitation of the BBC, but where its outdoor scenes would be filmed was the least of his problems. He hated the premise of the comedy he had been asked to pen – a story of three old men.

"I just couldn't get any joy out of it," he recalled. "It's got to entertain me first, or else I've lost. If it's not going to entertain me, it's not going to entertain anybody else, and I couldn't get a smile out of this at all."

A fortnight's fruitless struggle followed until the thought struck Clarke that three old men did not have to act their age, and gave him the breakthrough he needed. If they behaved like adolescents, the laughs would come. Even so, he wasn't optimistic.

"I never thought this would go, I really didn't. Three old men? No. I couldn't really see it getting a big audience."

Nevertheless, what Clarke wrote and saw broadcast for the first time in January 1973 was to change the face of television comedy, liberating it from the confines of the studio and leading the way for other shows to follow. Never before had a script called for as much location filming, and finding the right place took some time. Clarke suggested Rotherham, where he had been a policeman after National Service, but its heavy industry and rows of tightly-packed terraces did not feel right to producer James Gilbert.

The suggestion to take a look at Holmfirth came from Barry Took, later to become a fixture of television as host of the BBC's Points of View, who during the dog days of variety in the '50s was scraping a living as a stand-up. A disastrous evening at Holmfirth's Burnlee WMC was among the deciding factors that pushed him towards a career as a comedy scriptwriter instead. The club was hostile, but the town, nestling in the Pennines, was photogenic, as Gilbert and Clarke found when they drove there.

Holmfirth had hit hard times. There had once been 50 mills in the Holme Valley turning out cloths of the finest quality, but by the dawn of the '70s, the industry was collapsing. By the end of the decade, though, a trickle of tourists curious to visit the stone steps where Nora Batty shooed away Compo with her broom, or Sid and Ivy's cafe, was turning into a tide that brought 60,000 people a year.

The family that occupied Nora Batty's house became accustomed to the onslaught. Tourists would walk, unannounced, into the kitchen, and friends had to be informed that what appeared to be lightning was simply the popping of flashbulbs outside as the crowds took pictures under the leaden Pennine sky.

Filming could bring Holmfirth to a standstill, and gradually the show began to explore new locations, notably Marsden, to the west. It became a way of life for people in the Holme and Colne valleys to have the Last of the Summer Wine caravan arrive in May or June and be part of the community for up to six months.

Unlike the photograph on Sallis's wall, it wasn't always all smiles. The arrival of Wilde to replace the ailing Bates in the mid-1970s propelled the series into its glory years, but the starring trio had an often fractious relationship, the remarkable rapport they shared on screen cooling noticeably once the cameras stopped rolling. Tempers had frayed at the very beginning, when the bolshie, very Left-wing, egotistical and opinionated Owen had got into a furious argument with the ultra-conservative Bates over politics, and things were no easier with Wilde. They constantly rubbed each other up the wrong way, even as their on-screen rapport, together with Sallis, turned the show into Britain's favourite comedy.

Wilde would eventually grow weary of the friction, leaving to be replaced by Michael Aldridge, only to return when his career outside Summer Wine Land stalled. By then, the show had turned into an ensemble piece with an ever-expanding cast of eccentric characters like Howard and Marina, the illicit sweethearts, principally to take the weight of carrying each episode off the three ageing principals.

Long-time producer/director Alan JW Bell made increasing use of stunt doubles to spare his stars from exertion, but did it so artfully that until he revealed their existence in the mid-1990s, the public was fooled into thinking the 80-year-old Owen was still falling off walls and gates, or careering downhill in a runaway tin bath.

Change was a constant – Wilde's final departure brought in another comedy veteran, Frank Thornton, familiar as Captain Peacock in Are You Being Served, and then when he and Sallis became too frail for location filming and confined to studio scenes, Russ Abbot arrived.

The BBC, though, was about to call time on Last of the Summer Wine. Roy Clarke, contentedly ensconced in the countryside near Doncaster where he had spent all his life, now in his 80th year, wrote six final scripts for what would be the 31st series. The last would be the 250th episode Bell had directed.

Last of the Summer Wine bade farewell to Holmfirth on September 15 last year when the crew packed up for a final time after filming there for a month.

It had been like any other summer for the town – the tourists still came, the bus trips took them around the locations, the Compo mugs and Nora tea towels were still selling well.

Back at home in London, Peter Sallis was learning his last lines with the aid of tapes. Holmfirth had never become a second home for him, as it had for Owen, who grew so fond of it that he asked to be buried there, in a plot that overlooks the town.

Even so, the series and Holmfirth hold a special place in Sallis's heart. "I love to talk about it," he said.

He is the only actor to appear in every episode, and knew from the very beginning that this oddly-titled series was something special.

"When the scripts arrived, you knew that this was going to be all right. I thoroughly enjoyed doing it. I'm very, very lucky indeed to get something like that as an actor."

Last of the Summer Wine – The Story of the World's Longest Running Comedy Series, by Andrew Vine, is published by Aurum Press on Monday. To order a copy at a special Yorkshire Post readers' price of 16.99, plus 2.75 postage and packing (saving 2 on the recommended retail price of 18.99 ) ring our order line 01748 821122, open Mon-Sat 9am-5pm, or to order by post, send a cheque/postal order made payable to Yorkshire Books Ltd, to Yorkshire Books Ltd 1, Castle Hill Richmond DL10 4QP.

YP MAG 14/8/10